China’s structural reform gives new boost to economic development

By Zhao Zhanhui from People’s Daily

 

As excessive capacity gradually withdraws from the market and new industries and new economies emerge, China’s structural reform has reaped gratifying results, injecting new impetus into its economic development.

 

Both Huang Min, a young man from Hangzhou, the host city of this year’s G20 Summit, and a steel mill he once worked for witnessed those changes brought by the structural reform.

 

The Hangzhou-based steel mill Huang once worked was a state-owned enterprise founded in 1957.

 

In its glorious days, the plant contributed a lot to local economic and social development with an annual production capacity of 4 million tons.

 

But increasingly severe excessive capacity drove domestic steel prices down, the provincial government decided in 2015 to shut down the plant for “economic restructuring.”

 

Huang and his fellow workers faced losing their jobs. To help them back into the labor force, the steel mill provided a number of packages, ranging to retirement plans to training in business, other technical skills and labor export.

 

Thanks to those efforts, 12,000 employees like Huang now live a better life. Huang now runs a adult care center that offers health care, nutrition and other services.

 

China’s strategic emerging industries and high-tech sectors are experiencing rapid growth. In the first half of 2016, the added-value of strategic emerging industries saw a year-on-year increase of 11 percent, 5-percent higher than that of domestic above-scale industrial enterprises.

 

What’s more, investment in high-tech industries witnessed a 13.1 percent growth amounting to 1.56 trillion yuan, 4.1 percent higher than the growth of total investments.

 

At the same time, the public’s passion for innovation and entrepreneurship is booming, giving another boost to China’s economy. In the first six months of this year, 14,000 new enterprises were registered in China daily. A total of 164,000 patent applications were approved, a year-on-year growth of 41 percent.

 

With stronger high-added-value products and more exports of middle- and high-end technologies and services, trade structure has also been optimized.

 

In the first half of the year, the executed value of offshore information technology outsourcing, business process outsourcing and knowledge process outsourcing undertaken by Chinese enterprises reached 93.49 billion yuan, 32.02 billion yuan and 70.61 billion yuan respectively, increasing 7.5 percent, 26.9 percent and 6 percent compared with the same period last year.